A visit to the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage

Abstract

I spent two weeks in October visiting the Dancing Rabbit
Ecovillage. In this article, I give an overview of how that experience
affected me, and what I learned from the members of that
community.

It can be emotionally rough for the children of the Dancing Rabbit
Ecovillage to have new friends enter their lives so frequently,
only to leave again in a whisper of time. I have now returned from the two
week-long October visitor
period at Dancing Rabbit, where, a few days into my visit, one of
the children who lives there approached me to ask if he would see me again:
would I be coming back? Dancing Rabbit is making extraordinary progress at
embodying its core values of sustainability and community vitality, and I
grew attached to its children and non-children alike, but living there would
not be consistent with my own core beliefs, for their spirit is one of
self-improvement rather than cultural revolution.

Members of Dancing Rabbit are acutely aware of existing environmental
and ecological problems, and they are continuously confronting the emergent
implications of this ideology. Thus the village, itself borne by a 280-acre
swath of reclaimed farmland carved from farming country in northeastern
Missouri, presents itself as a tapestry woven from reclaimed artifacts;
carefully designed structures; and vibrant, practical, and exuberant gardens
with animal trails beaten through them, where the animals happen to be
humans. Practically-sized open spaces and a few roads, primarily for
walking, also insinuate themselves. All of this is a manifestation of the
ideas and values of the people making up this community.

The Dancing Rabbit community values transparency: they provided us
with detailed information about the many facets of their lives in a series
of seminars covering different topics, as well as a bracingly intimate view
of their personal lives at the village. Many of the days during the visitor
period were spent gathering casually for breakfast at the common house;
providing a status update, called a check-in, that helps members and
visitors stay apprised of needs and impressions; attending one of these
topical seminars; gathering for lunch at one of the food co-ops; helping
with a work party; and closing the day with dinner at a different co-op and,
often, a social event.

Figure 1 — This mural
adorns the wall across the courtyard from the Dancing Rabbit common
house

The community has made available high level descriptions of their
various practices; this discrete documentation provides a good
perspective on the reality of sustainable living, but actually experiencing
practices such as these adds a depth of understanding, as well as a personal
sense of connection, that no amount of reading can provide. Obviously,
reading this article won't change that dynamic, but I do hope that it will
help you get a sense for what a visit to Dancing Rabbit feels like, as well
as why visiting the village is valuable for making the ideals of
sustainability very concrete and tangible.

When we first arrived, and then strolled into the heart of the
village, one of the members greeted us and directed us to another member,
who offered us a casual tour of their village. The next day, the first full
day of our visit, we had a more in-depth tour of the village as well as the
first visitor seminar, which covered the history of Dancing Rabbit. These
introductions offered us an initial sense of the village and some key
details: the locations of the tent platforms where we could set up our tent;
the fact that they compost all human excrement, so poop ends up in a bucket
and needs to be managed properly, and people are encouraged to pee outside;
and where to find and how to use the communal showers and sinks and other
communal resources such as cubbies, the library, the kitchen in the common
house, and the computer room. As a result, much of the lives of the people
who live at Dancing Rabbit gets orchestrated into a sort of dance within
their chosen co-ops, such as when cooking breakfast, which becomes fun when
done in a spirit of understanding and cooperation.

Living sustainably involves thinking carefully about the sources of
the things you use, and the disposition of the byproducts that result from
this use. Note how carefully I danced to avoid using the word "waste",
because in fact the very concept of waste implies things that cannot be used
at all. In a closed system, true waste should not exist, and Dancing Rabbit
works hard to minimize actual waste. The basic resources that flow through a
community include water, food, and energy, and the members of the village
think carefully about how to manage all of these streams.

The village uses rainwater collection as its primary source of water,
although they do have access to the chemically treated municipal water, if
needed. The rainwater is filtered after collection, although there is a
prominant warning posted—and visitors were warned explicitly—that there are
still risks associated with drinking this water. I drank that water, and
have not yet suffered any apparent ill effects; neither are there any in the
members nor in my fellow visitors.

When it rains, the first thing that happens is that a lot of junk is
washed off of a roof by the rain. In order to deal with this, many members
install a diversion system in which a certain amount of water is directed
into a separate reservoir (usually a reasonable length of pipe); when that
reservoir fills up (with water and whatever else has been caught up in it)
the rain then overflows into the main cistern. The reservoir can then be
flushed by opening a valve. One member of Red Earth Farms, which is an
adjacent community, disagrees with this strategy, claiming that it does not
allow for enough initial washing; instead, he has a diversion system that
flows freely and requires manual intervention to switch the flow into the
cistern.

We had some ostensibly hospitable weather for our visit. It was
continuously sunny (and warm) during the day for almost our entire stay,
which was good for the supply of electricity. We got a bit of rain the first
night we were there, but we didn't receive any more until the last night. A
few days prior to that second rainfall, one of the members warned us to
conserve water because the cistern in the common house was running dry. We
did so, and the next day things were back to normal: they had tapped into
the municipal supply to deal with the problem. This is just one of a whole
battery of areas in which having a pointed awareness of the sources, and
hence limits, of various resources profoundly affects your consciousness,
and hence the community's culture.

As for byproducts, water used for cleaning—greywater—is
directed into a constructed
wetland, where plants help to filter the water. This is one reason
why the community is very careful to use soaps and other cleaning agents
that do not include any toxins or other dangerous chemicals. As mentioned
earlier, all human excrement is composted without using extra water, so
there is no blackwater
to manage.

Dancing Rabbit is not actively working to become a self-sufficient
community, and one facet of their lives that illustrates this is food
supplies and cooking. While they do obtain a large portion of their
vegetables from their gardens, they need to import a large percentage of
their calories, although they are still acutely conscious of the source of
this food. In their
own words:

At [Dancing Rabbit], we attempt to eat organic bioregional foods
in season. We currently grow many of our vegetables on site and try to
get as much of the rest of our food as possible from local organic
vegetable gardeners with most of our grains and beans coming from an
organic foods distributor.

They face similar challenges when it comes to cooking. Some
of the food co-ops cook as much as possible using wood stoves, or even solar
ovens where possible, but others, including the Sunflower co-op at the
common house, still rely on natural gas. Again, they describe these
struggles clearly:

Unfortunately, we have not yet found the ideal way to prepare food
that uses minimal energy and water, no fossil fuels, tastes great, and
takes a reasonable amount of time. We are experimenting, however.

Dealing with the byproducts of eating is easy enough: scraps
and inedible parts are composted. For imported foods, containers are still a
problem, but they recycle as much as possible.

As to electricity, this village of ecogeeks clearly still values
computing and telecommunications highly, as well as the other luxuries that
electricity makes available, such as artificial lighting. At the same time,
the larger world has concentrated much of its anemic efforts towards the
remediation of environmental damage on electricity production, so the
options for electricity production are seemingly obvious and
well-understood. We had a seminar on Dancing Rabbit's alternative energy
strategy, which was largely a useful class on the high-level electrical
engineering principles needed to understand the photovoltaic (PV) arrays
that form the obviously high-tech dimension of the ecovillage.

Dancing Rabbit is off the electrical grid, although they are very much
plugged into the telecoms grid. They have a few small windmills in the mix,
and they are considering installing a municipal-sized windmill; this would
also involve plugging into the municipal electrical grid, which they would
use as a cache or battery for their electricity, maintaining the goal of
producing all the electricity that they use. At one point during the visit,
another visitor asked whether using PV panels and windmills was ultimately
sustainable, given the materials and embodied energy needed to manufacture
them. The members of the ecovillage are aware of the limitations of some of
their decisions, and that they may have to make tough decisions in the
future. For the moment, however, they still value their electricity, and
they certainly value telecommunications with "the outside world". As with
the other key resources, though, this awareness of the source of the
resource dramatically reshapes the culture in this small village. For
example, members emphasize the importance of conservation, that is, reducing
consumption, as a first step. In contrast, as soon as I returned to "the
outside world", I felt the corresponding return of the strong temptation to
repress my respect for these resources, to use clean or hot water,
electricity, food, and basically every valuable commodity as if they are
essentially unlimited, infinite.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the initial work in a village is in
construction, and this is certainly the case at Dancing Rabbit, where
builders have a large role in the local economy. I was particularly struck
by the scope of the responsibility these people have invested into their own
lives when I learned about how they design and build homes and other
structures while keeping in mind their ecological principles. In the seminar
about their natural building techniques, the instructor gave us a crash
course in the entire scope of a structure, from foundation to roof, and in
the different approaches that have been the target of experiments to deal
with the effects of heat, cold, frost, rain, wind, moisture, and animals:
things which I had never before even considered. It was a dramatic learning
experience, and we had a number of opportunities to expand on that by
helping with ongoing projects at various work parties throughout the visit.
The community does a good job of providing an overview of their experiments
with natural building in their document answering the question What is Natural
Building?

For a group where first principles lead naturally to sharing as much
as possible, and which has explicitly structured itself so that people live
close together to encourage the development of strong community bonds, it is
not surprising to learn that they govern by consensus. The seminar on
consensus was particularly enlightening. Our leader was quick to disabuse us
of the notion that a system of consensus is equivalent to requiring a
unanimous vote on everything, which to outsiders familiar with a larger
political universe can smell like a recipe for perpetual, total gridlock. In
reality, a vibrant consensus process requires a deep understanding of
others' needs prior to making a decision, which makes it a very loving and
relational system. I would like to write up my notes on how to understand
consensus from the seminar, but they might overwhelm this article; perhaps I
will do that in a separate article.

One interesting aspect of the Dancing Rabbit community structure is
that it has been designed to allow for the creation of sub-communities, and
we got both a literal and figurative taste of this throughout our visit. As
mentioned earlier, we often swung in orbits with the Sunflower food co-op,
which gravitates around the common house. We also shared meals with members
of the Skyhouse community, which has a more methodical feel than much of the
rest of the village; with the Wabi-Sabi food co-op, which emphasizes living
simply; and at the Milkweed Mercantile, which is a general store and inn
that provides pampering to those visitors who might need a more gradual
transition. The Dancing Rabbit community encourages the formation of these
different smaller communities within the decision-making structure of the
community as a whole.

One of my favorite meals was a dinner with Wabi-Sabi that I helped
prepare. I was largely in charge of the salad, which was entirely taken
directly from their garden. I harvested fresh Sorrel, Mustard
Greens, and Kale; I cut down
stalks of green onions; and I picked several fresh green peppers. I didn't
know you had to massage Kale before eating it! I cleaned and chopped
everything, all the while enjoying some subdued company with the other
members of the co-op in the middle of another invitingly warm and sunny
afternoon. That salad turned out to be delicious; the entire meal was. I
don't think I'd ever had Sorrel prior to my visit, but now I want to find a
way to make it a regular part of my life. We ate together in the one-room
house of one of the Wabi-Sabi members, with night pressing in on all sides,
in cozy companionship.

In addition to encouraging diversity with sub-communities, there are
also two separate sister communities nearby. I mentioned Red Earth Farms
earlier; they are a community of homesteaders practicing permaculture, and
their community is immediately adjacent to Dancing Rabbit. A few miles away
lies Sandhill Farm, which is a commune, meaning the members collectively
share their incomes. We visited both: Sandhill for one of the regular
Tuesday potluck dinners, and one of our seminars was instead essentially a
field trip to Red Earth. The visit to Red Earth was extremely informative.
As homesteaders, members of Red Earth live further apart from one another
and primarily practice organic farming techniques. They are experimenting
with permaculture, using techniques such as composting almost everything in
place, and carefully considering how water moves through their natural
systems. Like Dancing Rabbit, they have beautiful gardens; it was at Red
Earth that I first tasted Sorrel, when one of the homesteaders plucked
leaves from a plant as she was introducing us to a variety of
produce.

I greatly enjoyed life at Dancing Rabbit. I have already touched on
the daytime beauty present at the village, arrayed into sun and sky and
garden. With the people I enjoyed music, conversation, dancing, and I
reveled in their rigorous games of ultimate frisbee. They play aggressively,
but they mix up the teams often and display great sportsmanship, which I
find deeply attractive. Day would give way to night, with all of its
attendant glamour. When the moon is hiding, the stars shine forth like a
glistening cosmic map through the implied infinity of the glossy black that
they pierce. Whenever it shone forth, however, the moon occluded ever more
stars as it waxed toward full each night, repainting the whole world in a
palate of lustrous silver enchantment. How much beauty do we abandon when we
embrace the city! I cannot remember the last time, prior to this visit, that
I was able to see the pale arm of the Milky Way. It stretches across the sky
grandly, our minds reaching out to meet it, our instincts aware of the
immense disparity in our celestial relationship.

So why can't I commit to being a part of the Dancing Rabbit
Ecovillage? It's a good question, and one I confronted many times over the
course of the two weeks. I might have hoped that expressing an idea would
become easier with repetition, but it appears I was wrong. I grew passionate
and emotional every time an opportunity arose to preach about the need to
push back against the larger culture of exploitation that defines
civilization. The larger culture has lost so much, and so badly needs to
reclaim it! Nearly everyone who talked with me agreed about the
destructiveness of that culture, but the members of Dancing Rabbit feel that
it is enough to try to create an exceptional model of sustainability and try
to lead by example, and while I applaud the degree to which their efforts
reflect the intensity of their ideals, I disagree that their ideals are
sufficient.